{"id":101209,"date":"2020-01-22T07:34:48","date_gmt":"2020-01-22T15:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/has-malaria-really-killed-half-of-everyone-who-ever-lived"},"modified":"2020-01-22T07:34:48","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T15:34:48","slug":"has-malaria-really-killed-half-of-everyone-who-ever-lived","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/has-malaria-really-killed-half-of-everyone-who-ever-lived","title":{"rendered":"Has Malaria Really Killed Half of Everyone Who Ever Lived?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Across Earth\u2019s history, our planet has been home to an estimated 109 billion<\/a> human beings. And according to another oft-repeated factoid, half of all the people who have ever existed were killed by malaria, the worst mosquito-borne illness. Mosquitoes aren\u2019t merely annoyances, they are mass murderers.<\/p>\n

But is this actually true?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s little doubt that these hellacious insects are prodigious killers of humankind. The bloodsuckers spread all sorts of diseases<\/a> \u2013 West Nile Virus, various kinds of Encephalitis, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, and Zika Virus, for example. However, the damage wrought by all of these diseases is piddling in comparison to malaria. Causing fever, tiredness, vomiting, headaches, and seizures, it struck 216 million people in 2016<\/a> alone, resulting in between 445,000 to 731,000 deaths. Believe it or not, that\u2019s an improvement over past years. In 2000, there were 262 million cases<\/a>, resulting in at least 839,000 deaths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Across Earth\u2019s history, our planet has been home to an estimated 109 billion human beings. And according to another oft-repeated factoid, half of all the people who have ever existed were killed by malaria, the worst mosquito-borne illness. Mosquitoes aren\u2019t merely annoyances, they are mass murderers. But is this actually true? There\u2019s little doubt that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}